The Covenant & the Charter - Above or Below the Law

American Political History · Apr 30, 2021 · 29m

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was not built despite England's crisis — it was built because of it. Without Charles I's eleven years of personal rule, without Archbishop Laud's campaign of religious persecution, without the Star Chamber and the forced loans and the mutilations in public, there is no Great Migration. There is no Bay Colony. The city on the hill was constructed entirely in the space opened by someone else's dysfunction.

This episode follows what happened when that dysfunction resolved. The Bishops' Wars broke Charles's rule in 1637. Parliament dismantled the machinery of…